


War Cry

by NaturalAddict



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mental Institution, Cults, Literary Device: Repetition, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Nurses, Pain, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Self-Harm, Trauma, Tsukishima Kei Has An Eating Disorder, Yamaguchi-centric, deprogramming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:15:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28811787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NaturalAddict/pseuds/NaturalAddict
Summary: But above all, he's tired.Tired of being a pet. Tired of not being himself. Of not being anyone.That's when he finally breaks.
Relationships: Tsukishima Kei/Yamaguchi Tadashi
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	War Cry

Tadashi watches his mother. She's small, but it takes three grown — tall, strong — men to hold her down.

All he can think is _she's wrong, she's wrong._

_They found out._

His ears buzz with her cry, that chorus of, "I'm sorry" and he doesn't know what she's apolosiging for. Not because she doesn't have a thing to apologise for.

But because there's so many.

It almost seems his body wakes up the moment there's a change in the strident cacophony.

"Go — go! Now, hurry! Go!"

_Mothers sacrifice._

He wants to stay.

Fear crystallises in his blood and makes it scratch at his veins; he wishes there were a way to get it out.

They look at him and _they know_ and he has to make a choice.

It seems as though he doesn't, but the whole world makes it for him. All he's known. All he is and has been. Will be. Wants to be. He's so afraid. 

He runs. 

* * *

"Yamaguchi-kun, it's time for your meds." 

Tadashi groans, for one second looking like the teenager who doesn't want to go to school he has never, ever had the chance to be.

He turns over, the strain on his arm making small red droplets stain his bandages. He needs new ones. They're loose. These wounds are fresh.

Others aren't. 

"Don't want them." 

The nurse sighs.

She's had enough of this for the entire week He wishes for her sake he could turn his brain off and — no. Not for her, he thinks, chancing a look at her tired, troubled face as she shifts the tray onto one hand, pressed between her chest and her fingers as she tugs a stubborn lock of black hair back behind her ear.

_She doesn't have it nearly as bad as they do._

"Yamaguchi-kun, you know the rules." 

He's so sick of rules.

"You have to take them." 

He wishes he were stronger for himself. His mother, who is- Isn't, but was, and was so much. 

For Kei.

Even though it's a challenge he knows she'll be forced to take, he sits up, juts his chin out and tells the woman through painfully gritted teeth: "Make me."

She makes him. It hurts. He doesn't cry, but he feels he has been crying for years.

The bed next to him is empty; a small mercy. 

This isn't the room he was sorted into when he first got here. His eyes glaze over as he stares. Not looking. Not seeing. He misses short blond hair and a sneer in the morning. 

Like everything else, that was stolen from him because of someone else's rules. 

And _when does he get to make his own?_ Probably never, if he stays here.

Maybe never, even if they let him go.

Tadashi bites his lip, hard. He doesn't have anywhere to go.

* * *

Asahara Shōkō was Christ. The nuclear Armageddon is coming. It needs to come. For Shōbō.

The group will survive the End Times.

All who are wrong should be killed. It's _phowa._ It's righteousness. It's what's best for them, for the world.

Running away is the worst mistake he's ever made. He needs to get back. He has to get back.

It's the only way he's ever lived. It's the only life he's ever known.

It's the only thing he does know, even though it's so many things, so many different things that don't go together and that make him doubt, though never without remorse, never without guilt. 

And never without fear.

_They killed his mother._

She was wrong. It was _phowa_. It was- It's the only way-

His name is Yamaguchi Tadashi. He's seventeen years old. He espaced from the compound where he grew up. 

_His mother didn't._

She was wrong. It was wrong. She was-

Someone must have come for her. Just like they are doing to him now. They made her forget the truth like they're trying to do to him.

Well, it won't work. 

Asahara Shōkō is the Lamb of God.

_So many people have died._

His mother changed her mind on her own. 

_Didn't he, too?_

No. No, she changed his mind for him. She always made up his mind for him. But she was wrong. She was wrong, and she's dead-

_Asahara Shōkō is not a martyr. He was delusional. A menace. Caused so much harm. Still does, even after his crimes against society led to his execution._

Maybe that was _phowa_. 

He's so confused, in so much emotional distress, pain, both physical and otherwise. 

But above all, he's tired. 

Tired of being a pet. Tired of not being himself. Of not being anyone.

That's when he finally breaks. 

His name is Yamaguchi Tadashi. He's seventeen years old. He escaped from the cult compound where he grew up. His mother didn't.

The truth is a valuable thing.

It's all he has, now, as he gets up from the chair on wobbly legs and takes in a deep breath. He has no mother and no home, no friends and nothing else but the fact that yeah, he might no longer be trapped a lie.

If he's lucky. 

He has never been lucky. 

* * *

"Who are you?"

He says the first thing that comes to mind, which happens to be the truth. 

"I don't know."

Something about his confused-frightened face and stance seem to strike a spark of mercy in the other boy, but something tells Tadashi that's not the norm for him. 

He points an elegant thumb at his chest, indicating himself, "Tsukishima Kei." 

Ah. 

His eyes light up with understanding, and he nods like a kid who got taught an important lesson.

"Yamaguchi Tadashi."

The prettiest eyes he's ever seen look over his unremarkable figure.

"I like the sound of that."

For what feels like the first time in his life, he smiles.

They are to be roommates. Which is about as intimate as things get here, according to the rulebook Tadashi read over and over on the way here. 

_No intimate contact allowed._

That includes kissing.

He's only been here five minutes and already he can think of a rule he'd like to break.

* * *

There are crystals in his blood. He needs to get them out. He has been trying this whole session, and the men — doctors, they claim. psychiatrists — hold him down in a way that doesn't calm him or still his heart, but instead only serves to remind him of his mother.

They call it remission, the way his brain goes back to the default. To believing what happens to be all he's ever known in his life. 

_Asahara Shōkō_ -

Yamaguchi Tadashi. Seventeen years old. No mother. No place to go back to. No family and home. It's important he remembers this, they say, because it's the truth. It's all he can know at the moment, while his memories are fuzzy and hazy at best, while he sits here on this chair with crystals in his blood.

_His name is Yamaguchi Tadashi. He is seventeen years old. He ran away from a cult compound. His mother... Made that possible. It's all he can do to honour her words by moving forward without looking back as much as he possibly can._

The truth, they keep repeating, and he thinks it's true. 

It's true he can never go back to how he was, even if he physically returns to the compound. All he can do to honour his mother is work on his identity and try to find out as much about the truth outside his cult as is necessary to live a life better than what he's had so far, with her. Without her.

The doctors let up, and he can finally breathe.

"I'm Yamaguchi Tadashi." He says, for what feels like the first time in his life. It's a mitigated repetition of what he's been told, and he wonders how much of that is the same as the things he was told growing up in the compound. "I'm seventeen years old. I'm a patient at a mental hospital. My mother..."

They're satisfied with what he has to say after that session, and there's talk of it being the last one and how he can move on to individual therapy like the others now.

There's something of a warm ball of pride expanding in his chest because now he gets to go to his room, and he can't wait to tell Kei. 

* * *

A single bed may be small for a reasonably tall boy and a remarkably tall one, but that matters little when there's the desire for closeness, a desire that runs deep. 

Deeper than indoctrination and deeper than fear. 

The type of desire that makes them break the rules. 

That's not all they do, though. Sometimes, Tadashi lies in Kei's bed with him and they both look up at the darkened white ceiling, at the bits where the paint is peeling off, and imagine they're seeing a sky full of stars.

"And we started playing volleyball together in junior high..." 

This is an exercise much more helpful than the deprogramming sessions. Kei plays with his hair and tells him stories of their life. 

_Maybe in a parallel universe_ , he says. _These things really happened to us._

It's not hard to believe.

Tadashi has never seen a volleyball, but he thinks maybe in a different reality he has, and maybe he was even good at the game. 

Good enough to stand by Kei on the same side of the net.

He learns about the rules, the positions, everything from Kei's mouth, and not once does this alternate reality (the reality of a life he has never lived, of less pain and less reasons to be permanently scarred and scared) sound like a lie.

It's a truth he wants to believe in, and he still has to fight the way he was taught to go with what others told him as his sole basis for reality. 

With Kei, it's different. There's no flipside to the way he caresses Tadashi, takes care of him as much as they can in the blind spots of the staff here.

So at night, Kei kisses the freckles on Tadashi's face, whispers some variant of a comment on how they look like stars on his skin, and-

And on many nights, that isn't enough. 

Not nearly enough. 

The nurses... How many are needed to separate them from each other when they get found out? 

All the crying, the clinging, resistance in a desperate form, everything is for naught. 

He screams. 

* * *

He _screams_. 

Where is his father? Why is this happening?

He overhears words like _jail_ and _imprisonment_ and _bail_ , but he understands little beyond his mother's crying and his own punishment.

It's his fault, they say, and he wants to shout back that he's just a kid. He didn't know. He didn't mean it. 

How could he ever have guessed they would be found out? Just because he told another kid his age (he met her by chance, it was just nothing, he wasn't betraying the group) what they had been about to do- What they are meant to do... 

Words he hadn't realised he had been speaking get cut off by another punch. 

The fist meets his cheek with such anger, disapproval that shuts him up more than the pain has. 

Though still, it hurts. 

It hurts when they hit him, when a knife is twisted into his side, and he is only just barely aware of being told they aren't going to kill him, this is just to teach him a lesson, there's no need to cry because he will grow up to be a man as strong as his father and make up for this little slip-up a hundred times over.

Tadashi nods, though his head feels heavy and he can taste blood.

He will make any number of promises if it means he can get up off the tatami floor and go to his mother, to what's left of his family.

They kick against his sides, searing hot pain flashing behind his eyelids (when had he closed his eyes?) and blossoming from the hits to close to the deep cuts. 

Struggling and protesting will do no good, he's told. This is all to teach him. Teach him to be better.

There's nothing Tadashi wants more than to be better. 

For now, he has to put up with this, because it's all his fault. 

* * *

... _It's all his fault._

For taunting Kei, for being so taken by this new form of proximity that he had risked it all.

And lost. 

He's lost.

So he collects plastic spoons, bites them into sharp objects, and tries to get the crystals out from underneath his skin like he has repeatedly been trying to do since he first got here — since before he got here.

There are moments when he cries, and those are when the nurses come to his new room periodically at night to check that he's really there.

Tadashi cries because he doesn't want to be there. He wants thin-but-strong arms around him, wants the lull of Kei's voice.

Before, they had been together all the time. And now, they're not even allowed to sit next to each other for group therapy. 

Even so, he notices the drip the day the blond is put on it.

Attempts to keep them apart have mellowed a bit now that focus was brought back to their issues. He tries to hide his bandages with long sleeves, because he knows Kei will feel as guilty over them as he feels about the drip, how it was _his fault_ Kei went back to not eating.

Suddenly, staff are paying more attention to what the blond puts in his mouth than who he spends his time with, and Tadashi wonders if that's deliberate.

Either way, it allows them little moments. During arts and crafts. For meals. It gives him a false sense of security, to know not all is lost, and Kei still loves him just as much. 

They'll get out of here, one day. 

For that, he needs start cooperating a bit more. 

If he gets deep enough into his issues with his therapy, if he stops bringing sharp objects to his skin, if Kei eats and proves he can keep it down...

Then they'll be together again. Outside. 

Where people live real lives and all things be still needs to learn. 

He may have accepted the artificial memories of a life he hasn't lived with his original roommate, but that doesn't mean he doesn't still want a future with him, away from here and the prison of their own minds.

The morning he decides this, the sun comes up like on any other day.

His palms are clammy; his bandages need to be change. 

Tadashi is resolute, but still met with a metaphorical brick wall inside his mind. 

When the nurse comes in, all he does is turn his back to her. 

This isn't fair. He shouldn't be here. Why does he have to go through this? Hasn't he suffered enough? Gods, he wants Kei.

He wants Kei so badly. 

The lights flicker on.

She tells him to take his medicine, and he tells her, _make me._

She makes him. It hurts. He doesn't cry, but he feels he has been crying for years.

The best next to his is empty; small mercies aren't nearly enough to melt the crystals in his blood. He sees Kei hovering around near the semi-open door, waiting. 

Maybe, really only just maybe, that's all he needs for now. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is meant to be just a brief snapshot of his life and thoughts. I wanted to go into more detail, but it wasn't what the story (or Yamaguchi) wanted. This may have a sequel.


End file.
